The state of mods in Beyond Earth

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is now officially available worldwide and were excited to see what mods the community comes up with. There are already some tools available to the community and even more are on the way. Read on to find out how you can create your own custom content for Beyond Earth!

What are mods?

Mods are custom changes and game conditions created by players that are freely distributed through Steam Workshop and the internet-at-large. Mods range from the small, changing very minute and specific game mechanics and data, to the large, adding in entire new factions and game scenarios.

What's in Beyond Earth right now?

Beyond Earth owners will find that the game currently supports FireTuner, Mod Buddy and Nexus. FireTuner is an application that is used primarily for debugging issues and dropping down units in-game, in order to reproduce test cases. FireTuner comes in handy when debugging mod builds or trying out various custom scenarios.

ModBuddy, on the other hand, is a bit more complex - an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. ModBuddy has built-in editors for XML and Lua, and includes functionality for packaging a mod into a single file and uploading it to Steam Workshop. ModBuddy is based off Microsoft Visual Studio and is largely similar to its Civilization V counterpart, so folks experienced in modding Civilization V should have an easy transition over to Beyond Earth.

Finally, Nexus is a collection of tools that allow you to customize in-game art assets. With Nexus, you can create entirely new units, leaders and the like.

What's coming?

Another major modding component that will arrive later is World Builder, which is pretty self-explanatory - you can use this development tool to generate your own custom maps and tiles. Nexus will be implemented in a future Beyond Earth update.

A very handy list of popular Civilization V modding tools, along with brief explanations for each, can be found over on Civfanatics. Firaxis Games is working to implement World Builder into the game as soon as possible, and well be sure to let you know as soon as its ready. In the meanwhile, enjoy tinkering around with Beyond Earth through FireTuner, Mod Buddy and Nexus, and be sure to share your created content with the community through Steam Workshop!